In fiber optical transmission systems the tolerable optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) is reduced by distortions, e.g. chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion, chirp, extinction, ratio, four wave mixing, self phase modulation, cross phase modulation which can lead to inter symbol interference (ISI) and therefore to bit errors in the transmitted data stream. The optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) can be increased when an adaptive receiver with equalization is used, since such receiver reduces the so-called eye opening penalty. The data stream may include a forward error correction code (FEC) which allows to improve the bit error rate (BER) for a given signal to noise ratio (SNR). This additional information from FEC is used to correct bit errors in the data stream when such data is decoded in the receiver. There is a great number of error correction codes in use, for example Bose-Chaudhury-Hoequengheen (BCH) and Reed-Solomon (RS), which fit for sonet/SDH digital wrapper formats. If the error rate of the data stream is below the error correction capability of the respective error correction code, the bit errors can be corrected.
For an adaptive channel equalization, a channel model must be established which means measurement of analog signals in which the information is embedded. Therefore, an analog-to-digital conversion of sampled signals has to be performed. Such analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is a critical item at high data rates. Also a simple eye monitor which measures the probable density of signal samples can be used for the purpose indicated. Equalization parameters are varied and adapted according to a control algorithm until best performance is obtained. In any case, additional expensive circuitry is needed for the equalization procedure.